Question

I’m writing a small c# program, I don’t want the final user to take screenshots while using my program, is it possible? Or even if he takes one, how can I know it?

Thanks in advance and sorry if this is a poor-content question due to my lack of experience in c# coding.

Answer 1

You can create a system-wide keyboard hook using the low-level keyboard filter and cancel any printscreen keyboard combination. But if someone has also installed a helper application (like Gadwin or something) it’ll become a lot more difficult because you won’t know beforehand what keyboard shortcut you should catch (most tools allow to specify your own hooks).

• Here’s an article on using hooks in C#
• and here’s a ready-made keyboard hook library for .net that uses global mouse and keyboard hooks (use Google to find more freeware and commercial libraries and tools).

On a side note: it’s generally not preferred to change the system behavior. Screenshots are system behavior and serve a distinguished purpose for trouble shooting. If you prevent this, users will not be able to show you a screenshot of something wrong. But if you must do it, you can do it.

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EDIT: on a deeper level, you can install an API hook. All screenshot applications use API calls to get the content of a (part of) the screen. But API hooks are hard to get right. A more trivial way is probably by writing a user-level driver. While you can prevent all this, it is really worth all the trouble?